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The World According To Bob Rauschenberg

to do anything he can to please. You have to like him, and his work, and once you succumb you begin to perceive order to the rambling, evidences of the aesthetic consciousness that controls his work and his life. Rauschenberg in conversation stumbles across the damndest things along the way, but he always has a direction in mind, always a point.

For example, the artist on his name: "My born name is Ernest Milton. My father's name was Ernest, so nobody ever called me Ernest, everybody called me 'Myihton,' the way that Milton is pronounced in the South-or if anybody ever got to liking me, Miltie. 'Myihtty.' So I decided that when I had my new life-this was after I'd discovered that I was a breed apart, namely an artist, and would have a new life-the name had to go. I was packing bathing suits, is what I was doing, and I'd gone about as far with that as I could. This was after the Navy, and I didn't want to spend the rest of my days packing bathing suits, and of course they all hated me there anyway. It's sort of like the John Cage story. In order to write his music he was making a living making beds in a flop house on Bowery, and to keep from getting bored he decided he would see how many beds he could make in a day, every day shortening the length of time, making more beds, more beds, until of course he lost that job. Another success story for John Cage. Too over-qualified. So, the person who was my closet friend at the time, Pat, later she was the woman in the "Blue Painting," she said, 'Well why don't you go to art school?' And I said, oh I can't, it's the middle of the semester, they'll never take me, I don't have any money, and she said, 'Well, if I can arrange it, will you go?' Which she did. So before enrolling at [the Kansas City Art Institute], I went through all the men's names I'd ever heard. By this time I'd gotten to know a lot of people, and I think there had been three more Bobs than there were Bills. Jim was third runner-up. So I said, okay, when I enroll in this new school in this new city, if they believe me when I say my name is Bob Rauschenberg, then it will be. Now, why anybody would doubt me didn't occur to me at that time. This was in Kansas City in the Savarin Coffee shop at four o'clock in the morning." 

Rauschenberg invariably displays a great deal about himself in these colorful and richly textured narratives, as he does in his paintings. In this case, the artist's recollection of an important life-decision--Milton Rauschenberg sounds all wrong, like an Abstract Expressionist--reveals his continuing bemusement at the American Deep South, his loyalty to those who have helped him in one way or another over the years (his model, and Cage, his longtime friend and collaborator), his understanding of an appreciation for the singular status of the artist in society ("a different breed"), his openness to serendipity, his sense of placement and unity. More than anything else, however, what is revealed by Robert Rauschenberg in his conversation is the same

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"Monogram" by Robert Rauschenberg, 1959 

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"The Bed," 1955

18   MARQUEE  MAY 1984